


i had visions of you, and in a dream where you could hold my hand

by whal



Series: i miss home, but i do not know if it's the right place for me to grow [1]
Category: League of Legends
Genre: Angst, F/F, Human/Monster Romance, Soulmate AU, and evelynn "i don't know how to stay tender with this much blood in my mouth", mentions of abuse but its minor, or alternatively: akali "i have belonged to you since the beginning of time" jhomen tethi, there's mutual pining in between, yeah that's about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:21:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28448346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whal/pseuds/whal
Summary: To love like this, she thinks, to love to the point where the flesh extends its vanity to an unknown land,where all the wild swarms in the lake.
Relationships: Akali/Evelynn (League of Legends)
Series: i miss home, but i do not know if it's the right place for me to grow [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2117196
Comments: 10
Kudos: 228





	i had visions of you, and in a dream where you could hold my hand

**Author's Note:**

> idea came from this [fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27994608)! 
> 
> song: [at a glance - message to bears](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UWIN_MI7Bw)
> 
> first try on evelynn and akali's voices, so i'm super nervous haha

It begins in a forest. Or at least, it begins with the soft reflection of a hand that isn’t her own. 

The lake rumbles with its affirmations; she peers into it with the body that isn’t hers. The dirt is warm against her palm, the leaves fracturing underneath her touch. 

She is drifting in and out of it. She remembers the dream, or at least amongst the many thousands that aren’t atoms belonging to a miniature of a life she has stolen, where she pulls the dead bodies out of the lake, where she lays them down--bare and wrinkling of tethering life forces (pain, agony, but none of them speaks of grief)--and dresses them in warm clothes again. 

It was late, how she remembers it. It was late and the wolves were howling and she wished she could lay down beneath the Earth and felt what a dead body felt. 

Dirt and skin and blood that--that isn’t her own--collided with the stuttering breaths of a heart slowing to its stop. 

She was burying a body--another body. 

They were running, running far enough that they forgot they were running. The bodies. The bodies within the lake. Within the dirt. 

She remembers a face. ( _A hand that isn’t her own_.) Fingertips brushing alongside her cheek. Droplets of water touching his skin, body laying. Lifeless. 

_I feel my fingers starting to lose their grip_ , he told her. 

The trees weren’t really trees, what she made of them, what she shaped them to be. It wasn’t like the trees had to be trees where the roots had to end somewhere. 

_I’m afraid I can’t hold onto that, darling_ , she whispered. Quiet, shapeless; a thumb petting his brow. 

His voice was cracking like bones inside the radio, the song he hummed to the berating of her heart beat--or at least that was his, the blood pouring out from his ear--through drumming speakers. 

She rolled him onto the docks, the wooden docks, body count to the toll of her feeding. 

_I love you_ , he changed his hand’s coordination, his eyes longing at her lips.

And continued, _I wished this was real_. 

_I’m as real as you want me to be_ , she pressured on his breathing circulations, pressing him in till his eyes rolled back to his head. 

Droplets of water splattered on her, his fingers gripped tightly onto her wrist. His body spasmed, pleas echoeing into the forest as the murder of crows left for the sky. 

_Evelynn_. His palm--the one not holding her wrist--slapped vehemently onto the wood. 

He started choking. 

_Evelynn._ His ankles grinded onto the ground below them. 

Dark spots filled his vision. The evening split itself in halves, love or death, he was trying to grab an end. 

_Evelynn._ He abandoned the ground and gripped onto his neck, palm on her fingers; he was trying to make a wish. 

His knees jerked once. 

Twice.

**_Evelynn_**. 

What a silly thing, 

he thought love was real, and the body an imaginary beast. 

And he gave out.

* * *

This was the image the man invented for her, headless deaths came out of her claws, a legacy left behind. 

She is trying to kill what she can’t save. This is the way it is, or the way it has to be. 

What she can’t give away, she lugs it on her skin. _The skin she flays_. _The shapes she tries to mold into_. 

She carries. And carries, and carries and carries. And carries. 

And it’s always been heavier than it looks. 

* * *

Every atom--

Every atom of herself, every atom of other versions of herself--

She is one body but of ten minds and of claws that want to rip her apart and make her anew again. 

What is immortal if not the grief that sits at her throat?

She is living like the birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in the clouds and specks of light floating in the sunbeams.

Grief is a snake swallowing itself--but she isn’t living. 

Every morph of the souls she devoured, the body remembers. And it continues to bleed itself to death as it gathers the wound into a bruise. 

What a loss when she thinks about how much effort was spent perfecting her form, this dust, this petal, this scent. All for it to be torn apart because forever is a word, _by definition_ , a word that exists but the concept itself lingers momentarily. 

She so desperately wants the sun to burn her skin. 

* * *

The forest grows back with patience; there is no rage here. 

She walked off from it--tries smashing the ice that separated her from herself. She whisks off in dust and smoke and she watches patiently for the rabbit to hop into its warren. 

She walks, clothes borrowed from the corpses she buried. Her skin as another ideal collection in her closet. 

She tries. 

The men she came across made it harder. 

All she could do was let it melt, and for all that’s worth it meant she lost all firm foothold--all sense of ground. 

She tears another body apart. 

The dried blood within her claws didn’t make it easier. 

The agony, the pain, the excruciating thing she deliberately names as grief--all of which she eats away--whispers at dawn break when she decided it was a night out. 

The way the pain needs oxygen, just once in a while. 

The way it grips at her throat, swallows at her insides like it wants to be let out. Like it wants to tear her apart. 

Some time, in that once in a while, grief catches the light and it starts smoking. 

Like it wants to write--

Like it wants to write. It wants to _confess_. 

Grief finds its unconventional way into her being. It wants to write what it has left into a letter, but it doesn’t want to enter the confessional. 

It wants her to seethe into her skin and it wants her to ask the men she flayed to give her a chance to be something better. 

It tries. 

It does. And sometimes in sneaking suspicion she swallows a happy memory of a man too fond of death, and then she wonders what she would do if she was given a chance to say something so worth saying without selling her soul. To make a sound--

To make a sound without wanting her claws scratching at her skin, reaching into her chest and splitting open her ribs. She wants the taste of real organs within herself, so she can reach beneath and peel apart her lungs. So she can breathe. 

_So she can breathe_. 

God, _god_ , the urge to grab a pen and pierce through her palm with it. 

The grief wallows so tightly that she tells herself she was supposed to enjoy this.

But how would she speak without giving herself away--would she have to attach bits and pieces of herself, and then give everything that she was, 

like it was a Sunday communion? Like the priests she lured out into the dark; and the only thing they wanted was to not listen to her confession, afraid that she’d have nothing left to give when she ran out of words. 

What they wanted was carnal, based, and stagnant. They wanted what they can’t have, and what they can’t have was _her._

Evelynn has nothing left to give of herself; she has nothing to begin with--when her fingers tire themselves out and her stomach aches.

The letter wrote itself, anyway. 

Words that she’d do anything to not let out. 

* * *

Akali finds her, hunched over a bloody body and eyes glowing a spectacle too bright. 

She doesn’t quite remember how it feels to feel, but there’s an echo in her chest that Evelynn thinks might have been curiosity. Or heart palpitations. 

There’s something different about the way she moves, like the earth is splitting its roots apart and chess pieces moving at every step of a potential loss. 

Akali reaches out, holding her gaze as a hand shyly caresses her cheek; another way to be taken from the game. 

“You’re not human.” 

Evelynn imagines loving something like this. To try and absorb the anger and uncertainty dwelling inside Akali. 

She imagines using her own body as a ground rod as she tries to earth her. 

She imagines that she’d split Akali apart with how much she holds. 

So she nods, and she swears to herself that she’d try this time. 

* * *

Evelynn promises protection, or something along with the sorts. Because that’s all she can offer.

Since what else could Akali have desired out of this? 

Her claws are made to hurt, to tear, and to bruise. Her vice and grip on violence is the same way how Akali tries to thumb patterns on her hand. 

She never stumbles, though. 

Evelynn never sees her without her twirling the kunai, something set upon it like how Akali would often question about immortality. 

_The body is the beginning of everything_ , she says. 

Evelynn doesn’t think she’d believe that anymore. 

“You learn to live with it.” 

She tells Akali. “Just like how you learn that whatever information that stays with you, it turns to a form of yourself.” (There are too many parts of other people, she’d argue. Too much for one person to absorb.)

_Is it worth it then?_

“To what?” Her lashers curl around Akali’s form. 

_You know, being._

(But she’s no person.)

“Oh darling,” she weaves her claws into Akali’s hair tie. 

“I doubt it, but _being_? It has its perks.” And she undone it. 

Evelynn feels like she’s droning on and on, but if this is what it takes to converse, _to be human_ , then so be it. 

“The trees. The moon. The sky.” 

The fire crackles dimly until it gives out completely, as the sun takes up its rotations where Evelynn can taste it in her mouth. 

And then she adds, much, much later; hoping that Akali is fast asleep. 

“And you.”

(“You’re a perk to being too.”)

* * *

Evelynn does not feed for the next few weeks. She staves off the hunger by gnawing at herself. 

Evelynn thinks, to some degree, that she deserves this. 

Without the pursuit for pain, she sees Akali again, and tells herself that this could be a problem. 

She ignores that the problem has been going on long before Akali tries to hold her hand, and for a while now.

The rosy gleam in her lips, and the fever dream of brown eyes. There’s no hazy line anywhere on her face, nothing greased and graying. 

She is all crisp; and spring. All golden and bright. 

Other entities would look at Evelynn and envy, they would try to drink Akali’s blood. To grow young from it. 

To want, to have, and to miss what can’t have room to happen.

There’s more to what Akali carries in between the gums of her teeth. She wants to say it’s love; she wants to tell Evelynn that she’s starving from it.

* * *

Akali vanishes for a few days. 

In between those nights Evelynn is left to ponder about being without her. If she drank too much of the sun, and the stars were making bell towers of her stomach as she struggled on her climb down. 

It flares up when there’s a storm coming. 

There’s not enough breathing air for Evelynn to comprehend everything, but for the first time in forever, she feels fear. 

* * *

Akali comes back in ragged breaths with a few cuts on her shoulders, eyes muddled and hands shaking as she seeks out for Evelynn’s waist. 

“My sisters.” She talks, dragging out the words, her visions spinning. 

“It’s Faey I guess.” 

Her chin is on Evelynn’s shoulder, hands mimicking claws by grabbing tightly around Evelynn’s back. 

“My mother--” 

She looks at the rustles of the trees and she thinks she’s ready for it, because what else could Evelynn have never heard of?

“My mother favors Faey.” 

“I, I’m not her.” She pauses. “I imagine myself great and grand and I want to be something more than just, than just me, you know?” 

“I know Faey means well, and mother, too, but,” 

Akali, then, remembers when she tries to press herself into the corners of rooms where nobody dares to enter, tearing herself apart to be accepted. (By the dark, she supposes. Or like how the moon knows the secrets only the dead bodies under the lake know.)

“I’m pretty sure they don’t,” She’s hiccupping, snot runs down to the edge of her lips, tears around her neck. 

“They don’t want me--my blood. They looked like they could get away with it.” 

“But they love to watch me bleed.” 

She cries big shaking sobs into Evelynn’s shoulder, feeling like there’s a tree trunk sitting in her throat; roots disguising themselves as blood vessels. 

And Evelynn--

Evelynn is all sap.

* * *

“I had a dream where like,” Akali expands her hand to the sky, her back to the grass. 

“It’s weird, ‘cause I flew across the ocean almost every night.” Her palm absentmindedly reaching for a lasher to hold onto. “And I pressed my mouth against the coral reef and I think I loved the ocean from then.”

“Have you seen the ocean Eve?” 

“Big water spikes and something about the way the sand rolls into your bare feet.” 

Evelynn thinks about the bodies on the dock, a grin at her lips. 

“Maybe. Why do you ask?” 

“‘Cause I’ve never seen one before, but I’ve felt like I’ve been there--”

(“Oh darling, you have.”) 

Evelynn almost wants to cut her off.

(“But not in this life.”)

“--more than a dozen times.” 

* * *

There were instances where Akali claimed she’d never be able to see Evelynn again. 

The one where she scrubs away her father’s anger and watches as it spirals down the drain. (His blood, down the drain, too.)

And the one where she washes off her mother’s sadness and watches it disappears as well.

Instances when she’s done, and pretends that her loneliness is rinsed away, something she can wash off along with her parents. 

That it’s not who she is--since her father can't get rid of his anger, and her mother can't get rid of her sadness. But one day someone down the line will try to scrub her skin raw and red to the bone to try and get rid of it all as well. 

Akali doesn’t know what part of herself she should sink, or what came to her.

* * *

“Will I be something?” (To you, she wants to add.)

Akali startles even herself. 

There’s the never-ending ache of love and sorrow. She benigns that in another life she’d be too afraid to ask this question, or Evelynn outright refuses her. 

But it’s this life, her life. Maybe it’d take her tearing out her hair, and kicking. And screaming, because she’d be facing her choice alone. 

Evelynn kisses her eyelid. “You already are darling.” 

“But am I something?” 

And the answer comes, because Evelynn’s all but been here since the beginning of time. 

“You already were. And you still have the time to be.”

It’s some years before Evelynn marked it off her calendar. And a few hundred more. 

* * *

_I was here_.

Is Evelynn foolish for wanting this? Surely it’ll end in flames, as it always does. 

_I existed._

Evelynn mushes herself in between the bustling crowds, Ahri following right in tow. 

“Eve, slow down!” 

Adrenaline is pounding in her ears, but she’d like to admit she likes the way it feels to burn. 

_I was young. I was happy._

She pulls at Ahri’s arm,

_And someone cared enough about me in this world,_

and she stalls at the right moment, breath stuttering. 

(She pictures Akali with dark brown hair, golden chain around her neck and something resembling a kunai in her bag.) 

The sound of the mic being dropped had the audience silent, and Akali _stumbles_ out of her performance. 

Evelynn’s hand came to her jawline, brushing desperately at her cheek. 

“We’ve met,”

_to take a picture of me._

“we’ve met before.”

* * *

All she had was the goodness inside her, _goodness_. 

Goodness. Within her. 

Akali touches her shoulder, eyebrows furrowed, thumb seeking out her lips. 

“Eve?”

She looks at her. 

“You okay?”

On the soft bed, hers and Akali’s, she tells herself that maybe she’d let loose of her longing. 

Her claws find the back of Akali’s jacket and she speaks, as if whispering, lips trying to make out the words, eyes searching Akali’s soul, “I don’t know. I’m not so sure.” 

“Do you wanna talk about it?” 

She shakes her head, and replies a curt ‘No.’ as her hand finds Akali’s. 

Being offered this tenderness, so much of this that it feels like maybe, just maybe, she’s been ruined before. She can’t handle it; so much of which Akali offers of herself. 

Evelynn’s grief will die with her. One day it will cleave and it will grow like antlers. Though she does not know the point where she would grow older than the urge to run away. 

There is pain, and there is pleasure; but it torments her. 

She cannot admit to it, but she’d like for the house in which she harbors in to feel more like a home and less like a cage. 

When does she stop outgrowing the walls?

The bones-- The bones on the plaster. The bones cracking, mangled. Bones of young men creaking beneath the wooden docks, tendons in her claws. 

Death is the proof for living and Evelynn’s all but died many times. But the point is--

The point is that she does not know how to touch Akali; she does not know how to stay tender with this much blood in her mouth. 

(The water in the lake is built upon the foundation of a grave, the same stale, attic air her lungs can’t breathe.) Her nose is already in Akali’s hair, hands around her waist. 

“Will you hold me instead?” 

She laughs, her calves touching Evelynn’s, one hand circling around her shoulder, the other over her head. 

“You’re already holding onto me.” 

“But … for the sake of it,” she pauses. Her lips inches away from touching Evelynn’s. 

“Yeah.” 

Evelynn’s all but pulls her in for the kiss. She murmurs in between slurred words, “I’m whatever you want me to be.” 

Akali cradles her cheek, smiles, and presses her lips to her forehead. Like hot wax imprinted on her being. 

To love like this, she thinks, to love to the point where the flesh extends its vanity to an unknown land, 

where all the wild swarms in the lake. 

This is not death. There is no death here, yet, but something much safer. 

That essentially all wounds come from the same place, as if they’re almost made of air.

Akali might call it god. 

Evelynn calls it her temple. 

(Another version of herself, in another universe, may not remember this. But she’s safe here, Akali’s arms around her like this. 

Maybe this time with Akali, Evelynn may forget how her hands can hurt her.)

**Author's Note:**

> #EVE: "if the idea of a lover is made for me by the world, i don't want them. the invention in time, for the gods that bless the land, made wheat and never bread. made tailcoats but never the destination of a sheep. if the labor of love does not exist, and the craft was never done to satisfy the hands that weave from them, i do not want it." ; i just think she's a romantic at heart


End file.
